One Person's Dumpster Is Another's Diner
By Becca Tucker, AlterNet. Posted March 21, 2007.
A subculture of people make a statement by living off the waste of millions. For three days, a reporter gave it a dumpster-diving go in the "freegan" paradise of Manhattan.
[snip]
The numbers, too, are beyond comprehension. So 5.4 billion pounds of food were lost at the retail level in 1995. So half the food produced in this country never gets eaten ...
But now that I've had to throw away good food I've foraged from the trash to make room in the fridge for even better food, now that I've passed up wrapped cinnamon buns not because they're stale, but because there are fifty of them, it's started to sink in.
This happens every night all over the city, and to varying degrees, in every city across the country. All the energy that went into growing, producing, packaging, shipping, refrigerating, and dumping all this food is worth less than what it would cost a store to run out of something and fail to make a sale. So they deliberately overstock. And while the food and packaging gets dumped in landfills, people are going hungry just blocks away.
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